Hunting Down Nativity

 

I’m going to puzzle over culture again, and include a cautionary tale of shopping in Costa Rica.

Today amply illustrated the triggering of my hunter/gatherer instincts. Just like so many other times here in Costa Rica. I was hunting down pieces of a nativity set. Just a cheap plastic one, but one to replace the one I had for years, since 1988 actually.

Back when we’re first moved from the United States to Costa Rica I’d shipped two full pallets of possessions. They arrived in one piece with a few notable exceptions like the small crockpot that arrived with a broken crock. I’d done the packing, the listing of every nth thing. The guys picking up our two pallets said to me that it was obvious I’d packed before for an overseas move. Yes, one to Germany years before.

The second shipment of goods didn’t go so well. I packed nothing, but I’d gone through the storage room over our two car garage and labeled where everything went, some to Goodwill, some to my kids, some out to the trash, some packed to go to me here. My real estate agent hired a team to pack the the twenty foot shipping container. They packed everything. The shipping list I gave the shipper and the Aduana here (tax folks!) didn’t match at all what arrived.

One three month strike and my first stroke occurred at the same time. Yes, the shipping folks were on strike all that time, but I was rather felled by a TIA and couldn’t have done anything anyway. Turns out in Costa Rica you have around a month to amend or explain discrepancies in your Bill of Lading. So as you can see circumstances made that impossible.

We had to make the impossible choice of deciding what of our possessions came here. Went down to the ample warehouse and before the watching workers we had to sort through and label what we wanted. This being Costa Rica, the land of do it the quickest way, they ignored our markings and list and brought whatever they wanted. We lost a lot of things of great sentimental value, including that old nativity set that I hand painted and have fired in the community kiln in Germany. It was nicked up, it was scratched, but it meant the world to me.

In the years we’ve been here I’ve noticed that Christmas shopping, like many things, is very hit and miss. The first few years I didn’t bother to decorate because if you hadn’t bought your lights and ornaments by mid to late October you were just out of luck. Plus it just dawned on me during my early Christmas decorations shopping that the reason I cannot find any wire hooks is because here they don’t exist. You can buy a reel of wire with an attached cutter to make your own hooks. Different culture with differing reasonings.

A few days ago I had to make a quick stop to one of the Wal Mart subsidiaries where I encountered these inexpensive plastic Nativity figures, all running less than one Mil each, roughly a buck fifty. There was just one problem, what I sometimes call “Tico Math” here. A failure to reason out and consider the best money making business decision. Example: well, these Nativity figures. The store I first stopped in had the animals, the shepherds, and the three wise men, but not angels or the Holy Family.

I was surprised by this, and told my dear husband that if I walked into our much nearer Wal Mart subsidiary and they had the angels and the Holy Family I was coming back for these guys. Sure enough, a few miles on down the road the other place had only angels and the Holy Family. Bought them and returned to the first place for the wise men, the shepherds and the animals.

This is so typical and sort of the dark side of the “Pura Vida”. It never dawns on anyone in the warehouse, the store or management that they’d sell much more of these cheap little plastic figurines if they’d just ship half of each box to the same store, so there would be full sets in one place instead of having to be like an old crone hunting through the bushes looking for rare herbs. Tico Math strikes again.

Wal Mart and their subsidiaries here, Pali, Maxi Pali and Super Compro, actually do this odd have one thing and force you to hunt for the other part somewhere else. I guess there’s always Pequeno Mundo!

People ask me all the time about shipping household goods here and I always tell them to make sure they pack and list every single thing. Plus evaluate what you really need here. You cannot pack too many surge protectors because they aren’t cheap here and you cannot have too many. We have every single electrical device here plugged in to a surge protector. You also cannot count on any permutation of Wal Mart to carry them either! Just bought one this morning at the expensive computer store here after the one in my sewing room died.Ran around thirty five dollars. Not a fancy model, just very basic. I didn’t want my expensive Bernina to bite the dust due to the flickering and surges in the electrical grid here.

The other useful thing that is amazingly expensive here is anything plastic. They don’t tend to make plastic here, and anything imported, even cheap plastic stuff from China, is expensive due to the import taxes the Aduana charges. I regret I didn’t get more plastics and import them. Threw out all my plastic laundry baskets and had to buy all new ones at higher prices, same with shoe boxes and other plastic items.